Mystery woman in Trump military academy photo unveiled

In the curiosity cabinet that is Donald Trump’s life, the photograph is a trifle.

In the curiosity cabinet that is Donald Trump's life, the photograph is a trifle.

But the mystery around it has endured for a half-century. In it, a teenage Donald looks out from his 1964 military academy yearbook, standing next to a young woman smiling brightly beside a pair of artillery guns. The caption reads, "Ladies' Man: Trump."

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Who is the young lady?

The photo has surfaced again and again over the decades — this year in the Washington Post and the New York Times, and in the 1990s in the Daily News, to name just a few. But she has never been identified. Was she a girlfriend? A date? Has she seen the photo in the years since? Does she know?

Donald Trump was dubbed the ladies man in his 1964 senior yearbook at the New York Military Academy in Cornwall-on-Hudson. (Special to the NY Daily News)

Back in 1964 at the New York Military Academy, when the young Donald was in the senior class, there weren't many opportunities for romance. Nestled in the Hudson River Valley in New York, the academy back then was an all-boys' school, although today it is co-ed. Trump's classmates have said that he liked to invite stylish girls to the campus on weekends, which helped him to be crowned "Ladies' Man" in the traditional yearbook popularity contest.

This week, we set out to find the woman in the photograph. We live in a Google-animated world, but this required shoe-leather reporting. So we hopped in a car and set off on a journey through musty yearbooks and faded memory.

The academy lies just outside the town of Cornwall-on-Hudson, a charming hamlet now ablaze with fall colors, about 60 miles north of New York City. We rolled up to the campus, with its castle-like architectural flourishes and spit-and-polish tidiness, and there were no students to be seen. No voices echoing on the immaculate lawns. Wandering the grounds, we spotted the artillery guns where Trump and the woman had posed.

We saw a light through the window of the admissions office, so we walked in and introduced ourselves. The dean of the academy, off campus at the moment, was summoned.

The 127-year-old school has been struggling financially. Last year it was reportedly sold to a nonprofit group, the Research Center on Natural Conservation, backed by investors based in China. When asked about the ownership, the dean, Jonathan Gastel, replied cryptically, who really owns a school? There are some 30 cadets enrolled this year, down from more than 500 when Trump was there.

Dean Gastel escorted us to the library and pulled the yearbook in question from a shelf. Its title: Shrapnel. We had come armed with only one clue, namely that the woman in the photo was probably a secretary employed by the academy. We had gleaned that from the recent book "Trump Revealed," which mentions that fact, but doesn't name names.

We were in luck, or so we thought. We spotted a photo labeled "secretarial staff," and one woman had potential. Young and striking with short, dark hair, she seemed to fit the bill, although it was hard to tell, because the woman in the Trump photo isn't looking directly at the camera. Following a convention of generations past, her name was given as her husband's: "Mrs. Paul Suto."

We found Mrs. Suto in the White Pages, remember those? She lives near the school.

We rang her doorbell. "We're trying to solve a mystery," we said, standing on her front porch, holding a copy of the Trump photo. "Is this you?"

She was surprised, but game. Eighty years old with white hair and glasses, she took a careful look, then declared, "No, I don't think that's me." But she wasn't entirely sure. She did recall posing for occasional photos around campus when a woman was needed.

She studied the picture again. "I don't remember that outfit," she said. Her view was firming up. One does tend to remember one's outfits, even from childhood.

She stepped back into the house, while we stayed on the porch, and showed the photo to her husband. "No, that's definitely not you," we heard him say.

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The phone rang. It was a neighbor, who had noticed two strangers — the two of us — hanging around on her porch. The neighbor wanted to know: Was everything OK? Mrs. Suto gave her reassurances.

She does remember Trump. She pointed out that the students would sometimes get flirty with the secretaries, because there weren't many girls around. "I had a proposal to go to South America with one of the cadets," she recalled, smiling. "Sometimes I wish I had."

We showed her a copy of the photo of the secretarial staff. Several had passed away, she said. But maybe the mystery woman was someone not pictured — someone who worked at the academy for just a short time. "I think her name might have been Diorio," she said. "Actually I think it was D'Agata."

Fran D’Agati Dunn with her husband, Mike Dunn. (Abigail Pesta)

The next morning, we asked the librarian at the academy to look up the secretarial staff in the year-earlier yearbook, 1963. And there, in the photo caption, a clue: It named two secretaries who were not pictured, and one was "Miss Frances D'Agati."

Yes, Mrs. Suto told us later, she remembered her. She went by Fran. She married an Irishman, maybe.

Then, another clue: We spoke to a graduate of the academy, Jack Serafin, who had served in the same company as Trump at the school, Company E. He remembered Trump, who had been in charge of the company's guns. Trump, he said, had made him memorize the serial number to his rifle. He still remembers the serial number: 155836-1.

He also remembered Fran. She was married to a teacher, Serafin recalled — "I think his name was Mr. Dunn." He checked his senior yearbook. "If it's the one I'm thinking about, it's Michael Dunn."

And then our sleuthing took a 21st-century turn. We fired up Facebook, and within minutes, found Fran D'Agati Dunn. The internet told us that she still lives not far from the academy.

There's a smiling Halloween scarecrow on the hill in front of Mrs. Dunn's white brick-and-clapboard home. We rang the doorbell, photo in hand. A woman appeared at the door. As soon as she saw the object in our hands, she smiled, blushed, laughed. "Oh, gosh," she said, shaking her head in disbelief. The look on her face said: You found me.

"Do I have to admit to it?" she asked, laughing. Then she invited us in, and called to her husband, Mike. When he saw us with the photo, he joked, "Are you here to arrest us?"

"So how did you find me?" Mrs. Dunn asked. No one had ever come looking, she said.

She knew the photo had been circulating again this year. One of her sisters had been the first to spot it in the news. "She called me from Florida, hysterical, laughing," Mrs. Dunn said. It also had a moment back in 1990, she said, when Trump was divorcing his first wife, Ivana, and the press was trying to find out more about his mystery woman, Marla Maples. The Daily News ran a big picture of the high-school photo, and one of Mr. Dunn's relatives, a pressman at The News, later sent a proof of the page.

Mrs. Dunn, now 71, said she was always fine with remaining a mystery. She is a private person. Sitting on a soft, plaid sofa in her living room, surrounded by family photos, porcelain figurines, and Halloween pumpkins and ghosts, she declined to talk politics or to say who she planned to vote for in the presidential election. But she did agree to talk about the mysterious Trump photo.

She couldn't remember why she had missed appearing in the secretarial staff photos in the yearbook. She did recall that the yearbook editors had plucked her from her desk in the admissions office one day to pose for the Trump shot. "They just came into my office and they asked, would I mind having my picture taken with Donald Trump? I said, 'Sure, why not?'"

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She showed us her high school senior portrait, when she was 17, just two years before posing with Trump. Sure enough, there were the same dark eyes, bright smile, short hair, with the same curly lock above her left ear.

She didn't know Trump personally at the academy, and the two didn't say much during the photo shoot. "He said 'hi,' I said 'hi,' and that was kind of all we said to each other," she recalled.

But it wouldn't be their last encounter.

Decades later, she met him again, when he attended a reunion at the military academy. Recalling the incident with a laugh, she described how she brought along her proof page from The News — the one featuring the photo. "We waited in line, and I went up to him. I said, 'I'm the girl in the picture.' He said, 'Well, you were beautiful then, and you're even more beautiful now.'" Then Trump autographed the page.

She said her family for years has been joking about her role in the "Ladies' Man" photo. She and her husband had told a few friends about it. "Some people don't believe it," she said. "They don't think it's me." The priest at the couple's parish wanted to announce from the altar that she had once dated Trump, but she stopped him. "I said, 'Don't you dare!' I never dated him."

Mrs. Dunn grew up in the Hudson River Valley, where her father, Vincent Salvatore D'Agati, ran a company that made women's raincoats, VSD Clothing. She began working at the military academy in 1963, after graduating from Spencerian Business College. She had known Mr. Dunn for years, having met him through relatives. The two married in 1965, a year after the Trump photo, and Mr. Dunn began working at the academy that year. After the wedding, they lived on campus. She worked at the school for two years, and he worked there for five. They went on to raise three sons and a daughter. Over the years, they continued to work in education, with Mr. Dunn also working for Unicef for a time.

We sat and chatted with the Dunns for nearly two hours. We had left our car running out on the street, getaway-style, because the battery was dying and we'd already had to jump-start it once. But this is not the kind of place where your car gets swiped.

The Dunns have fond memories of the academy, where she worked for the admissions director and he taught subjects including math and history, and also coached tennis. "They were very nice young men. I used to teletype letters home to their parents," Mrs. Dunn recalled.

They were amused at the thought of the big photo reveal. They had been shopping for Christmas presents earlier in the day in Poughkeepsie, never imagining they would come home and learn that the girl in the photo had been found. "We shouldn't have come home," Mrs. Dunn joked.

"We have some neighbors across the street who will think this is a gas," Mr. Dunn said. "All those people who didn't believe us, well, now you better believe it."

Allan Dodds Frank is an Emmy and Loeb-award winning investigative correspondent. Abigail Pesta is an award-winning journalist who has written for outlets including The Wall Street Journal, Cosmopolitan and The New York Times.